<

Love this album

Varcharz has worked it's way onto my constantly rewritten list of favorite albums. Duul is the best rock song you never will hear on radio, and Skik is the soundtrack for what's got to be the best videogame in history.

Take it on its own

Ignoring whatever Mouse On Mars has done in the past, this is a lovely album. Well, lovely isn't really quite the right word. Varcharz reminds me of mid-2000s Autechre, but with a BEAT. Chaotic, noisy deliciousness with some 8-bit sounds thrown in for fun. Duul sounds like electronic death metal. My favourite track is probably I Go Ego Why Go We Go. This is a bit of a grower, but the sounds on here are just amazing.

Noise

Not artful or fun, just noise. Annoying. Put it in and annoy the crap out of your friends guaranteed. In any group of more than you (kidding yourself that you enjoy it), someone will say "dude...really?". Love MOM, hate this album. New direction, spew direction. Get an earlier album.

TOTALLY ORIGINAL!

I Check out a lot of different kinds of Music, I make Music Myself, and the one thing that really grabbed me about this Artist is the sheer originality of the Music. This artist is to Music what Picasso was to Painting. That's how I feel about it. This Artist uses lots of different Sounds and Sound Effects, almost like Paints rather than how most Musicians think of putting together Tracks, this Artist thinks completely different about the whole concept, which really blew me away. I Like it! It's So Weird it's Really COOL! That's the best way to describe it.

New work is good, but not their best

I am a die hard fan, so I was lucky to see them perform this album live before I got the album. If I had just heard the album, I would have felt cold and alone in the universe. Fortunately the way you need to listen to this is LOUD! This is probably their most forceful and ripping collection of tracks. It's very divergent from their previous works in being so raw and animalistic. There is still the trademark MOM uber-layering of sound. People who like hardcore will love this and people who like their tracks a little more subdued will most likely shy away from this one. Emusic took a selection of tracks that were less than 10 seconds and combined them to one track. The cool thing about the separate tracks is that you could put them on shuffle and get a weird personal performance.

Back in the Day...

Mouse on Mars has picked up where Niun Niggung left off: with thick, dirty instrumentals. Don't get me wrong, this is an updated sound and a unique album in MOM's catalog (just like the rest), and the unwanted orchestral stuff has been jettisoned.
I've been waiting a while for this album, and I knew I wouldn't be disappointed.
I can't wait for the Eek-a-Modest-Mouse-on-Mars 3-way collab.

Just in case anyone thought Mouse on Mars got too poppy and danceable on Radical Connector, its follow-up, Varcharz, is nearly its polar opposite: jagged, fractured, splintered, and downright violent-sounding, it’s easily the most extreme music the duo has made, and is right in line with the rest of Ipecac’s output. The album’s squelchy, stuttering beats have ties to Mouse on Mars’ noisiest, most abstract earlier work, such as Niun Niggung’s “Distroia,” but Varcharz is hardly a regression or a rehash. If anything, the way Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma repeat the tracks’ simple themes and tweak them until they’re just about to break into a million pixels makes the album among their most experimental work. This theme carries to song titles like “Chartnok” and “Retphase,” similarly chopped-up bits and pieces of almost-recognizable words and self-explanatory, onomatopoetic syllables. “Bertney” is a particularly good example of Varcharz’s modus operandi: beginning with a twinkling, mischievous melody that could’ve been borrowed from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, it’s processed and disfigured until it’s completely overridden by brutal hissing, scraping, and thumping. Even the most accessible tracks have a harsh edge; “Igoegowhygowego” rides an almost stupidly simple, insistent bassline borrowed from booty funk, which is then scribbled over with grating synths. Varcharz goes deep into the blackened heart of noise with “Duul,” a relentless, ice-burned track that features the snarling, smoking remains of what may have once been a guitar over a seriously malfunctioning beat, and closes with “One Day Not Today,” a 13-part onslaught of glitchy heaviness that explodes like digital shrapnel and ends with tribal drums. Yet, even at its most deconstructed, Varcharz’s chaos is actually quite orderly; underneath it all, its splatters and streaks of sound are nearly as organized as Radical Connector’s more song-based material was. Interestingly, both albums were recorded at the same time, and they work well together as the extreme yin and yang of Mouse on Mars’ aesthetic. Varcharz shows that the duo is just as adamant about — and adept at — exploring the wilder fringes of their sound as they are honing it into forward-thinking pop. – Heather Phares